SAS Grid Gets Its Own Quick Start on AWS

Quick Starts simplify the process of deploying specific workloads to the AWS cloud by leveraging AWS CloudFormation templates. Each Quick Start package condenses multi-step deployment procedures down to a few clicks that can result in a fully functional environment being operable in an hour or less.

There are many Quick Start packages available from AWS spanning multiple categories, including DevOps, security and Big Data/analytics. The latest addition, announced Thursday, falls into that last category.

SAS Grid is the name of a computing environment developed by the SAS Institute that's designed for data analytics and machine learning. It's meant to enable high-availability, scalability, workload management and efficient processing.

As SAS puts it in its documentation, "A SAS grid computing environment is one in which SAS computing tasks are distributed among multiple computers on a network, all under the control of SAS Grid Manager. In this environment, workloads are distributed across a grid cluster of computers."

The new SAS Grid Quick Start enables administrators to quickly set up SAS workloads in AWS. "This Quick Start bootstraps the infrastructure for a SAS Grid cluster by provisioning Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for SAS Grid, SAS Metadata Server, and SAS mid-tier components," AWS said in its announcement. "It also sets up Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre, which provides a shared directory for the grid."

To deploy SAS Grid on AWS, users must have a subscription to the Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre AMI via the AWS Marketplace. They will then have the option to launch the SAS Grid Quick Start on either a new or existing virtual private cloud.

"After you deploy the Quick Start, you can obtain a SAS license and install SAS Grid directly into your configured environment," AWS said.

More information on the SAS Grid Quick Start is available here, and a deployment guide can be downloaded here.

About the Author

Gladys Rama is the senior site producer for RCPmag.com and senior editor of AWSInsider.net.